I recently put a used motor in my 90 Loyale. When I started it up after the swap it started billowing smoke and lots of it, there also sounded like a loud ticking noise coming from the engine. The motor was used but came from a reputable source. It sat around in his garage for about six months then in my garage for a couple more months. Does anyone have any suggestions for diagnosing the problem without having to pull the motor.

I forgot to mention the smoke is not from coolant burning, I have not refilled the coolant since the engine swap. I wanted to be sure the motor was working properly before I added coolant. I only ran the motor for about two minutes due to the excessive smoke.

Assuming you have oil in it, you're not really going to hurt anything from running it. My guess, from picking up VW engines that had sat for months/years, is just old gas, carbon, and whatever other crud has collected in the engine.

 

I'd compression test it as well for good measure.

The ticking sound is because it hasn't been run in a while and the HLAs have bled down (or don't work to begin with...)

Smoke is probably because someone put fogging oil in the cyls, tipped it on it's side and filled the cyls with some oil, etc. It just needs to run a bit.